


The Immortal Cup

by TerresDeBrume



Category: The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Black Character(s), Black Family, Canon Rewrite, Clary Fray-centric, Demons, F/F, Injury, Lesbian Clary Fray, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pandemonium Club (Shadowhunter Chronicles), Protective Jace Wayland, Worldbuilding, racebend
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-27
Updated: 2017-08-28
Packaged: 2018-10-11 13:11:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10465824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerresDeBrume/pseuds/TerresDeBrume
Summary: Clary’s life plan from her eighteenth birthday onward is fairly simple: do her internship with her mother atMoonlight Tattoos, become a world-renowed tattoo artist, and find herself a girl she can spend the rest of her life with, pretty much in that order.The part where she tries to save a girl from  what looks like a would-be rapist and turns out to be a demon kind of throws a wrench into that, though.(Or: This is what I wish we’d had inCity of Bones.)





	1. Pandemonium

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FelicityGS](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FelicityGS/gifts).



> So this is it. After three years of intense discussion, preparation and worrying, here we go! I'm aiming for bi-monthly updates, hopefully I'll manage to stick to the schedule. either way, the fic already has its ending written down, so it'll get here eventually.
> 
> Special thanks to Fel, who sparked this monster project, to Talys and Kat, who betaed this chapter, and to everyone who let me scream at them about worldbuilding and Shadowhunters culture and other time-consuming details. Love u guys!

 

“Lunch is ready,” Jo announces from the threshold to the parlor, “and we’re not waiting for tardies!”

 

Clary, half-laughing already, puts a finger to her lips as she points down at the floor, giggling when her mother rolls her eyes in response. Jo doesn’t move, though, and when Madame Dorothea’s dramatic cry shoots through the wobbly floorboard—when Clary starts running in place as fast as she can for the prescribed three seconds—Jo leaps to the center of the parlor and adds a heavy stomp of her own to the mess without a trace of hesitation.

Downstairs, someone gives a shrill scream of surprise, and Clary mouths ‘kids’ at her mother before they tip-toe out of the parlor, quietly pad through the front hallway and its colorful paintings, and step into the dining-slash-living room, where Luke is already heaping large servings of chicken curry on their plates.

 

“You know,” he tells Clary as she slides into her usual, stickers-covered chair, “if you keep adding extra service you should ask for a raise.”

“You’re just jealous ‘cause she likes us,” Clary replies with deliberately exaggerated smugness.

 

Luke snorts at the idea and gives Clary’s head a playful shove when he walks past her to sit down by her mother’s side. They bicker about who gets to eat the freshest _roti_ , then settle into the meal like they haven’t had anything in days which, in all honesty, is how they always eat: wolf everything down fast, go for seconds, and exercise—or, in Clary’s case, run—most of it off afterwards.

She refuses the third helping when it comes around though: her stomach stretches so far around her meals it almost looks like she’s pregnant, and there won’t be a track meeting to help her digest until next month, when school picks up. Not that she’ll be going back to school, what with starting work and everything, but that’s hardly the point.

 

“Seriously, Dad,” she tells Luke, “I don’t want to end up doing a barrel impression on the dance floor.”

“You’d make a cute barrel,” Luke says with a fond chuckle, just before Jo shrugs and says:

“Just poop it out before you get dressed and you’ll be fine.”

“Mom!”

“I’m just trying to be practical.”

 

Clary pulls her tongue out at Jo, who reaches across the table to give Clary’s hair a playful, painless tug. Clary looks, cross-eyed, at the deep umber of her mother’s skin—at the way it contrasts with the bright copper of her coiled hair—and laughs even as she leans forward to accommodate the movement, Luke gently mocking them while he rises from his seat and starts gathering his plate.

 

“Honestly,” he says with mock disdain, “you don’t see people play with my hair.”

“Hey,” Clary protests, ducking from under her mother’s hand, “it’s not my fault you shaved your ‘locks off!”

“I’m nearly forty, I’m too old for long hair.”

“Yuqi’s dad has long hair,” Clary replies with an easy shrug, gathering the glasses in her free hand, “no one seems to mind.”

“Speaking of Yuqi,” Jo asks from where she’s gathering bread crumbs off the table, “when are you girls meeting up again?”

“We said eight in front of Pandemonium,” Clary replies over her shoulder as she crosses into the kitchen, “but I’m leaving at six so Ami and I can have dinner on the way there.”

“You sure you don’t want one of us to drop you off at the subway?”

“Thanks, mom,” Clary says, holding back on a sigh, “but her brother’s coming along. We’ll be perfectly safe.”

“Please,” Luke points out with only a little more sarcasm than usual, “there are worse places than New York but I’d hardly say it’s perfectly safe for three black kids to walk around at night.”

 

Clary knows better than to roll her eyes at that, of course, but she swallows the speeding of her heart, tells herself fear doesn’t erase danger, and starts washing dishes in silence, until her mother asks how she’s coming home.

 

“Yuqi’s neighbor is a taxi driver, and she’s agreed to give us a discount, so we’re carpooling.”

“Oh,” Jo starts, taking a plate out of Clary’s hand so she can towel it dry, “is Yuqi spending the night here then?”

“No,” Clary says, twisting on herself to let Luke reach for a sponge so he can clean the table, “Aminata’s. It’s closer to her place. Otherwise she’d have to wake up at butt o’clock to catch her flight.”

 

Jo nods as she goes back to work—not that there’s much of it, with only three people fed, but it’s the principle of the thing—but her lips are pressed tight, and Clary barely waits until she’s done washing the last plate before she walks up to her mother and hugs her tight.

 

“We’ll be alright, mom, I promise.”

“Fine,” Jo sighs after a long pause—the way she looks at Clary then always makes her want to squirm a little. “But you take a deodorant spray with you, and you keep it at hand, alright? It’s—”

“It’s not pepper spray but it’s better than nothing,” Clary completes with a small, not-quite-playful smile, “I know.”

“And make sure you keep your ring on.”

“You know I never take it off.”

 

It’s an old fashioned, family-crest-style silver ring that used to belong to Clary’s father. There’s a large, Gothic ‘M’ carved into the bezel, framed in a seven-pointed start. Jo gave it to Clary for her eighteenth birthday last year, and the weight of it on her forefinger has become as familiar to her as breathing, a constant reminder of a man she never got to meet.

 

“Good reflex,” Luke approves when he comes back into the kitchen, “it’ll protect your knuckles if you need to punch someone, although don’t forget—”

“The thumb stays out of the fist,” Clary recites, chest constricting with the familiarity of it, “don’t resist arrest if that happens, but make sure people are watching, and if things turn violent, always try to run before I fight.”

 

Clary lets her features fall into a sad, wishful grimace before she concludes:

 

“Come on, don’t ruin the mood, please.”

 

The face Luke pulls at her then is so grotesque, Clary doesn’t even have time to protest before her mother gives him a playful punch on on the shoulder and the two of them end up bickering over nothing, Clary chuckling at them without even thinking about it.

 

“Anyway,” Luke laughs when they’re done, “I have to head back—I need to set things up for the signing tomorrow.”

“You really should move in with us,” Clary tells him as he kisses her mother goodbye, “that’d be easier.”

“Not for my morning commute,” Luke chuckles, but Clary insists:

“We could find a place in the middle—”

“Now who’s ruining the mood, Clary?” Jo asks, and Clary sighs.

“Fine.”

 

She lets Luke kiss her cheek on his way out of the kitchen, then yells:

 

“I still think it’s stupid!”

“I can’t hear you!” is the only reply she gets before the back door squeaks shut downstairs.

 

Clary rolls her eyes, pats her hands dry on her jeans, and goes to retrieve her latest commission work from the art room to settle down in the parlor.

The art room—and oh, boy, did her classmates laugh at the idea of an art room when she first brought it up—is a good working space, as fully furnished as you’d expect from a tattoo artist of Jo’s experience, but the parlor is the best part of the house for working under natural light and, unless Clary is working with oil or inking her latest tattoo design, she usually prefers to use the plush window-seats as her working spot, although saying ‘I’m working in the parlor’ doesn’t sound any less snobbish than ‘I’m working in the art room’.

 

She’s gotten used to the idea by now, reconciled to the oddities of her life—like living in a separate house from her dad, even though he and Jo are still happily married, for example—but there was a time not so long ago when she daydreamed about being a little more ordinary. Nothing much—just having parents with regular desk jobs and an office of some kind in the old brownstone, or maybe have Luke finally move in with them after seventeen years of marriage. That would have been a lot less remarkable.

Growing up has its good sides, though, and Clary has grown ever fonder of her life in the past few years. Money is always a little tight—that’s what you get for living in a brownstone on an artist’s salary—but never dangerously so, and it comes with the privilege of being raised never to be afraid of taking the wrong path.

 

(She doesn’t always succeed at that last one, but at least when she grows too shy to dare try new things, she knows she has support, and that’s already worth a lot.)

 

So, Clary works in the parlor now—watches former classmates come and go in the square in front of her house, enjoying the last of summer before they go to college and she starts an apprenticeship in the salon her mother works for—and, from time to time, she gets to hang a picture of someone who put her art on their skin. It’s not a bad deal, even if her knees crack when she finally gets up to get ready for tonight’s outing.

She still can’t quite decide between skinny-jeans-and-white-top or miniskirt-and-blue-shirt but, if she’s being honest with herself, Clary just knows there’s no way she’ll be fully satisfied with her looks tonight, no matter what she wears, no matter how long she hesitates on it. It’s a special night, after all, her last outing with Yuqi for months—most likely years—to come, and she wants to dress up for the occasion...but much as she’s gotten more comfortable with herself in the past few months, she has yet to find a satisfying resolution to her conflicting desire of finding the Perfect Look—and therefore look stunning—and remain mostly unnoticed at the same time.

 

She’s standing at the foot of her bed, on the verge of tossing a coin and be done with it—or, if all else fails, just slip on her usual, favored clothes—when Jo pokes her head into the room and asks:

 

“Can’t choose what to wear?”

 

Clary twists around to throw a helpless glance at her mother, who smiles and steps fully into the room. She gives each outfit a long look—even goes so far as to lift the jeans one to get a better look at it, as if she’s never seen the clothes before—purses her lips, and adds:

 

“Are you trying to impress people?”

“It’s silly, I know,” Clary sighs, stepping back until she can sit in the reading nook bordering her window, “it’s not like Yuqi or Aminata actually care.”

“But you still want to impress them.”

“I just—it’s a special night. I just want to make sure they both know that...and I also kind of want to feel good about myself,” Clary explains—complains, really, if she’s being honest, but the, it’s not like she really needs to acknowledge that.

“Well, it’s definitely not something others will care about,” Jo agrees with a smile, “but it’s not silly. Hold on, I think I’ve got something....”

 

Clary watches her mother pause in the middle of her sentence and leave the room without another word. She listens to Jo stepping through the hallway into her bedroom, the vague sound of a wooden crate creaking open—and she’s about halfway through braiding the left half of her hair into a quick—slightly lopsided—cornrow when Jo comes back, and pauses on the threshold with a fond smile on her lips.

 

“You know,” she tells Clary, “this is the kind of things that make me glad I came to the States.”

“What, the braiding?” Clary asks, careful to keep at it so she doesn’t look too invested in the topic, “I could have watched YouTube tutorials from Switzerland, you know.”

“Of course. You’d just have had to listen to strangers tell you how much prettier you’d be if you straightened your hair—”

“They do that here, too,” Clary points out, and Jo gives her a little smile before she says:

“Yes, but I don’t.”

 

Clary’s finger still at the end of her cornrow, and she gives her mother a puzzled look that makes her smile—thin, maybe a little sad, too—as she runs a hand over her short-cropped afro, the curls of it even redder than Clary’s.

 

“That’s just how it was back there—everyone I knew did it. I didn’t stop doing it until I came here.”

 

Clary, who grew up encouraged to take pride in her hair—in her skin, in her nose, in her blackness—blinks at her mother’s revelation, but Jo just shrugs and, with the same gap-toothed grin Clary sees in her mirror in the morning—chipped front teeth excepted—she unfolds a green shirt she’d hidden behind her back.

It’s made with some kind of satin, the emerald fabric glistening in the golden light of late afternoon, and the ballooned shoulders at the top of the sleeves flap in the air like little wings. Clary follows the line of fabric down to the wrists, embroidered with dragonflies in glossy black threads that taper off into elegant points. The round neckline and empire waistline give the shirt a more demure air than Clary was going for tonight, but it’s still more elegant than anything she owns and, as far as making the occasion special goes, it’ll do the job perfectly.

 

“Wow,” Clary says, putting the last touch to her second braid, “I’ve never seen you wear this shirt.”

“That would be because I haven’t managed to fit into it since I got pregnant,” Jo says—she jiggles her breasts with her hands and twists her face into a grimace, making Clary laugh. Then, more soberly, she adds: “It was a gift from my parents. I was wearing it when I met your father.”

 

Clary finishes her cornrow in silence, eyes glued to her mother’s face and the distant, wistful expression that always comes with talk of Morgan Fray. Clary doesn’t know much about him—she knows he and her mother met young, dated young, settled young. They were barely even in their twenties when Clary was conceived, and then her father died in a a house fire. Jo and Luke, both orphans by then, left Switzerland after that, settled in New York, and got married two years later—from what Clary knows, tax benefits were the main motivation there. Love came later.

Anything else Clary knows—details about how the three of them lived back in Europe, what they did, who they knew, what they looked like—she stole it from moments like this one, when Jo or Luke starts to talk and doesn’t realize they’re saying more than they want to until they’ve let slip something new.

She looks at the blouse again, with its dragonflies on the wrists and classic cut, and wonders how it looked on her mother’s frame, how she wore her hair that day—straightened, yes, but what kind of ‘do?—what her father noticed about her first. There’s no answer to be found with Jo though—she’s coming back to the present already, and her smile when she encourages Clary to try the blouse on has lost its nostalgic tinge.

 

With a nods, Clary hurries behind her wardrobe door, slipping the shirt on in record time, and smiling when it turns out to be a pretty good fit. It’s a little loose around the arms, maybe, but then Jo has been working out forever, whereas Clary’s only exercise came from the school’s track team. She’s got good legs muscles, but her arms are about as limp as wet noodles.

 

“So,” Jo asks after a bit, “how do you like it?”

“It’s great, mom,” Clary says, truthfully, before she closes the wardrobe and looks at herself in the mirror, “really great. No wonder he fell in love with you.”

“I like to think my clothes weren’t the only thing he liked,” Jo replies with a smile, “thank you very much.”

 

Clary watches her mother brush nonexistent lints off the sleeve, fingers trailing down to the dragonfly embroideries without seeming to really see them—Clary takes a big breath before she asks:

 

“How long did it take? For you to move on after he died, I mean. For you to start liking Luke.”

“Well, I liked Luke before I met your father,” Jo replies with a cheeky grin—she sobers up when Clary glares at her, though, and sighs: “I don’t think either of us ever really got over his death.”

 

She takes Clary’s face in her hand and kisses her forehead before she exits the room, slouch weighing heavy on her shoulder. Clary watches her go in silence, stomach twisting with the same awkward sense of guilt she gets after she tricks her way into hearing more about her father—or anything that happened before her life, for that matter—but it’s not enough to prevent her from trying to picture the scene again, this time with new details.

Her mother, only just turned twenty and glowing with you and life in the green blouse, long hair ironed out of its coils, pulled away from her face, maybe—and then, Clary’s father, a handsome, twenty-one years old white boy with blond hair and the same green eyes as Clary’s. They smile at each other at some kind of party—maybe a school thing—in the early weeks of 1995, then Morgan Fray says something nice about Jo’s shirt, and the magic happens.

 

It’s rather skeletal, as descriptions go, and it pales in comparison with the wedding pictures Aminata is sick of seeing, but it’s more than what she had up until now, and Clary is still smiling about it when she tells her mother goodbye. She exits their apartment through the front stairs, stopping at the door between the downstairs hallways and Madame Dorothea’s apartment to ask if her timing was off this morning—‘It was perfect dear, quite perfect,’ Dorothea says before she pushes a five dollar bill in Clary’s hand and closes the door in her face—before she finally reaches the little square that faces her home.

 

Aminata is already there, crouching in her high heels so she can scratch a skinny black cat behind the ears and coo at it with a delight Clary would envy if she didn’t know what a demon the animal can be.

 

“He’s adorable!” Aminata exclaims with a high-pitched squeal when she spots Clary, “is it one of your neighbor’s? Because it doesn’t have a collar and I want to take him home!”

“Bad idea,” Clary says with a grimace, “he’s not anyone’s as far as I know, but he’ll try to skin you alive if you pick him up.”

“Oh.”

 

Aminata grimaces in her turn and playfully insults the cat before she gets back to her feet and waves her brother over to their spot

 

“Guess it’s time to go then. Love the shirt, by the way. Guys are gonna line up tonight.”

“Ami.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re not interested, blah blah blah—send them my way and you’ll be fine. Now let’s go, or we’re gonna be late.”

 

Clary rolls her eyes, greets Marcus with a little wave, and folows her friend into the streets of New York.

 

{ooo}

 

They get caught up in conversation after dinner—Aminata isn’t changing country, but she’s still going to San Francisco for college and talking with her increasingly feels like they’re trying to make the best of what little time they have left—and don’t make it to Pandemonium until it’s almost half past eight. By then, the crowd is thick enough that heads turn when they slip under the red ribbon to join Yuqi about two thirds down the line—Clary overhears a racist comment, but she resolutely puts it out of her mind.

She’s here to have fun, not let an ass ruin her last night out with her friends.

 

Around them, the smell of too many brands of perfume mixes with hot asphalt and traffic fumes, thickening the air until Clary almost feels it on her skin. She breathes in deep, takes it all in with enough enthusiasm to make her forget the armpits she’s jostled into. She has been short all her life, after all, and the days she’d feel depressed about that are well and truly gone by now. As it is, Clary just bounces on her feet as she and her friends inch closer to the door, her skin prickling with the same anticipation she felt back when she showed her portfolio to Jo’s boss in Moonlight Tattoos: exciting, but kind of scary all at once.

 

“Aaaah,” Yuqi exclaims in Clary’s ear, possibly in response to something Aminata said while Clary wasn’t listening, “I’m so glad we can do this before I leave!”

“So are we!” Aminata promises, “right Clary?”

“Wouldn’t have missed it for the wor—”

“Holy shit—girls, look, hottie alert!”

 

Clary closes her eyes for a brief moment, takes a breath, and leans sideway to stare at the front of the line. A white guy in his early twenties—maybe to or three years older than Clary—is talking to the bouncers, cobalt hair shining in the neon light when he does a weird little shimmy. He’s tall and muscular—which probably counts as hot in a generic, Hollywood-ish sort of way—and Clary is about to say as much when the black claws tattooed on his hands peel off his skin, turning into sickly white flesh as they go and seize the bouncer’s face.

Clary gapes, swear word at the tip of her tongue, then hisses when pain shoots behind her eyes, forcing her to look down and shield herself from the light until Yuqi steers her a few steps closer to the entrance.

 

“Clary, are you okay?” Aminata asks when she notices Clary’s passivity, “is it a migraine? Do you need to go home?”

“No!” Clary promises, “I’m fine, it’s the lights.”

 

She shakes her head in the vague direction of the blinking entrance sign, and fishes her water bottle our of her purse, grabbing some paracetamol to top it off, and downs one with a healthy swig of the other before her friends can protest.

 

“Are you sure?” Yuqi insists, “I’ve seen you sick before, Clary, it’s not pretty. If you—”

“I said I’m fine!” Clary snaps, sharper than necessary, “I took my meds, I’ve got water—I’ll be okay.”

 

Maybe she’ll be babbling about fairies or some such nonsense tomorrow, but that’s nothing new, and certainly no reason to ruin the evening.

 

“Alright, Grumpy, don’t get your jeans in a twist,” Aminata protests with a light shove. “Did you even see the cute guy?”

“Saw him high-fiving the bouncer,” Clary replies with a shrug, massaging her temple to chase the last of the pain, “I didn’t think her was anything to write home about.”

“Ugh,” Yuqi pretends to groan, “lesbians!”

 

Clary replies with a glare—Yuqi looks cowed for about two seconds before she chuckles the whole thing off—and stays silent until the line pushes them in front of the bouncer’s vacant, ‘I’m bored out of my mind, please kill me now’ eyes, and into the club. A wall of loud bass and sweat-soaked, smoke-filled air slams into Clary like a tsunami, and she pauses to take the scene in.

There’s the bad smell, yes, and many dancers who are more enthusiastic than talented ready to bump into Clary armpits and elbows fist, but she grins anyway. Sure, it smells and it’s almost oppressively hot, but it buzzes with life too—shakes at her ribs and diaphragm with every throb of the bass, shines in a violent chiaroscuro of neon colors and bright whites set afire by the black lights. The entire room like Rembrandt and Jackson Pollock’s love child decided to make a movie, and Clary kind of wishes she could slap a canvas on the whole thing and preserve it forever.

 

Yuqi and Aminata drag Clary through the crowd—she makes sure to stay behind them to benefit from their taller stature and avoid the varied downsides of being five foot two in a country of giants—toward the bar, and before long they’re sipping on their favorite cocktails, Yuqi mourning the lack of alcohol in them for the thousandth time this year.

Clary pokes her in the side for that, but quickly returns to her drink when her friends start trying to figure out who’s the best looking guy on the dance floor right now. Clary, entirely uninterested in that—and not in a mood to try and find a a girl to her tastes—decides to indulge in some people watching as she waits. This is far from her favorite tradition of theirs but, then again, she’d probably like it better if she wasn’t the only queer girl of the group.

 

She has ways to keep herself occupied though, and it’s worth going through the ritual for what comes after. On the dance floor—in the dark, surrounded by bodies that barely realize she exists—Clary transforms. She peels the awkward bits of her skin off, slips into a different costume, and as long as she doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes for too long she’s confident, self-assured in a way she never quite manages in the light of day. In the dark, she can become more than herself so long as she doesn’t stop to think about it too much, and no one can take that from her.

Thinking is pretty much all she has to do for now though, stuck as she is sipping on fruit juices while Yuqi and Aminata finish their review of tonight(s crowd—which is probably why Clary jumps when Yuqi elbows her in the ribs to point at a white guy in a black sleeveless shirt, eyes shining with a clearly fake, nuclear-waste green.

 

“That’s the guy from earlier!” Yuqi says with a grin. Clary has no memory of ever seeing said guy, but she nods anyway:

“He’s okay, I guess, but he looks creepy.”

 

He’s prowling the dance floor like a dog after food, blatantly staring at the girls he passes in a hungry way that sends shivers tumbling down Clary’s spine. A solid seven on the creeper scale.

 

“You’re just saying that because you don’t want him to look at you,” Yuqi yells over the sudden increase in music volume, “come on, he’s hot!”

“I don’t—”

“Yuqi!” Aminata calls out, bumping into them with the giddiness of excitement, “I think you scored!”

“Girls, I thought we were here to have fun—”

“Yeah, but we’re gonna be here all night,” Aminata shrugs, “we can take an hour to see if we can find someone!”

“Every time you say that,” Clary points out, “I end up alone.”

“Not this time, promise!” Aminata says, which would be a lot more convincing if Clary hadn’t heard it a hundred times before.

“Just find yourself a girl,” Yuqi adds, and Clary scowls.

“You know what,” she says as she pushes Yuqi’s hand off her arm, sourness blossoming in her stomach, “go see your hot boys, I’ll be at the bar.”

 

Or dancing, or wherever, really. If her friends want to try and find themselves boyfriends, it’s their right after all, but Clary came here to have a good time, not to chaperon the evening. She makes Yuqi and Aminata promise to text her if they decide to leave—even temporarily—and then she leaves them to their flirting and stomps back to the bar.

She orders another soft cocktail and by the time it arrives—a good five minutes later, thanks to the Friday crowd—Clary has managed to work herself up from frustration to annoyance to full on anger. what’s the point of having a girls’ night out to send a friend off if you end up leaving a third of the company in the dirt, really? None, quite obviously, and the only reason Clary doesn’t voice her opinion on the topic is because she knows she wouldn’t have time to make up with Yuqi before she leaves for Beijing tomorrow.

 

Still, all of this is even more ridiculous than it’s hurtful, and after another minute or two of ruminations, Clary decides she can’t just let it stand. Sure, Yuqi and Aminata aren’t trying to be mean, quite the contrary, but that doesn’t mean they’d like it if the positions were reversed, and the thought of it makes Clary’s blood boil.

On impulse, she decides to go and talk to the first interesting girl she can find the crowd—and, if possible, to keep the conversation going until Aminata and Yuqi are forced to wait for her the way she’s waiting for them right now. That sounds like an appropriate revenge.

 

She scans the party, avoiding eye-contact as much as she can, until her gaze gets caught on a girl whose white shirt shines like a beacon under the black lights. The girl is tall, lean but not quite thin, and a long whip of silky black hair tied in a high ponytail brushes against the middle of her back. It’s difficult to see more detail from afar, but even before she really gets close Clary notices the stiffness in that girl’s shoulders, the rigidity of her neck and, most of all, the way she flinches when the blue-haired guy from earlier grabs her arm and crowds her against the bar.

Clary gapes—pauses—squares her shoulders and keeps on walking. Non-confrontational intervention, she reminds herself,starts with a conversation. She’ll get to the bar, talk to that girl like they’re old friends, and stay there until the creep leaves them alone and they can call a bouncer. Simple, clean, efficient—everything Luke and Jo ever taught her rolled in one impromptu package.

 

The only problem with that plan of attack is that, as Luke once said, the earlier you get there, the batter it works. Clary remembers that—wants to apply it to her current situation, if only because she has no experience of her own with this kind of interaction and a guide sounds like a condition of survival right now—but short as she is it’s impossible for her to push her way through the crowd and keep an eye on the bar at the same time, let alone make her way over there quickly.

She has to slip between dancers and bar hogs, shivering when she brushes against body parts entirely too intimate for comfort and stopping herself from gagging whenever she ends up with her nose too close to a particularly smelly armpit.

 

By the time she reaches the girl’s stool, it’s empty.

 

She spins on on herself—stares at the crowd until her vision feels blurry with strobing lights and her temples start pressing at the edge of her brain—and finally spots the pair a little further into the club, the guy dragging the girl toward a black door marked ‘STAFF ONLY’. Clary keeps her eyes on the girl—her steps stiff, her back rigid, arm extended as far as it will go as if to delay the moment she’ll have to catch up with the creep—fishes her deodorant from the bottom of her bag, and follows the other two before she can vomit her heart out from sheer stress.

Rushing through the dancers—this time, she forgoes politeness and uses elbows—Clary makes her way through the room in record time and slips through the door with her only weapon brandished in front of her.

 

She finds them in the storage room—her, cornered against the shelves, his body just tall enough to look down at her as he crowds her against the metal—and before she can think past the thick cloud of anger filling her vision, Clary finds herself shoving forward, tapping him on the shoulder, and spraying him in the face with deodorant when he turns to look at her.

 

“What the fu—”

 

The girl’s sentence ends on a grunt as the guy catches her in the temple with an erratic move of his arm, before he turns back toward Clary. His face is red, eyes raw with irritation, but when he squints his gaze zones in on Clary and her stomach drops at least six feet under the ground, blood draining from her face as she clutches her spray harder.

 

“Don’t come near me!” she shrieks, arm thrust out in front of her like it’s going to make a difference, voice shivering hard, “leave us alone! I’ll spray you again if I have to!”

“You stupid little mundane!”

 

The guy’s voice hisses and whistles, high-pitched and gravelly at the same time—it grates at Clary’s soul like a nail on chalkboard, and she stumbles away from him before she realizes what she’s doing, unable to tear her eyes away from the uncanny green of his pupils. He takes a step toward her as if in slow motion, hands reaching out for her throat, and when she tries to step back again her foot catches on a cable—sends her reeling backward until her head hits the ground and her legs flop in the air like useless sausages.

She twists around until she’s on her belly, springs to her feet and bolts toward the door before she even catches her breath—screams when a hand catches at the end of her cornrows and pulls her back in, hatred slamming into her as soon as the guy’s face enters her vision. Clary raises her arm again, spray at the ready, but he catches her wrist before she completes the movement, twists until her bones jar under the skin, and she has to scream in pain—pushes the sound as loud as it will go, wants to turn it into a cry for help but his hand goes from her arms to her throat and then she’s choking, choking, choking—he lets go of her seconds before a brown hand punches him off Clary and onto the ground, leaving her to fall on her knees and gasp for air.

 

The room fills with pained grunts, the dull sound of flesh on flesh, and a succession of screeches that can’t possibly come from a human being—can’t possibly be anything but a product of Clary’s terror—and Clary manages to get on her hands and knees, crawling to the nearest crate of supplies and bracing herself against it to try and catch sight of the girl through the fogginess hovering at the edge of her vision.

She finds the guy first—he’s sprawled on the ground with his neck at an odd angle, the black claws of his tattoos bulging out of his forearms, wriggling and squeezing until a bone-colored finger pushes out of the flesh—leaves a raw, red mark behind like a blister that just exploded. Clary puts a hand against her mouth to stifle a shout of horror, catches the edge of the crate and tries not to vomit when a second finger comes out of the skin and reaches for the girl in her white shirt with a long, hungry rasp of a breath in.

 

“Get out of here!” The girl tosses toward Clary—there’s something in her hand, a set of heavy chains that whistles as she spins them at her side—but Clary can’t make herself obey.

 

“You gotta come too!”

“I can handle it, just get the Hell—”

 

The door bangs open, slamming against the wall, and the girl shouts something in a language Clary doesn’t understand. Next thing she knows, something yanks her up by the collar of her shirt, and she screams in renewed terror as a black-clad silhouette rushes past her and toward the fight with a long knife in hand.

 

“Let me go!” Clary screams, throwing her elbows—her feet, her knees, her head—out in the air, hoping to catch something soft, but whatever is holding her holds on tight.

 

It drags her to the closed door—she kicks and screams at the thing behind her, scratches blindly until she hears an exclamation of pain and her bad wrist gets twisted behind her, pulls at the muscles of her arms and up into her shoulder. It steals the air from her lungs and keeps her quiet when a voice hisses in her ear:

 

“I’m trying to save you life you idiot, now shut up!”

 

Clary doesn’t answer—pants hard to catch her breath between the pain and the sobs, tries to remember what little she knows about fighting, about making an escape, but before she can drag any of it from her memories she’s brought up to the door. A gloved hand moves past her right cheek, throws the storage room open, and shoves her onto the dance floor to the sound of someone shouting somewhere behind her.

 

She crashes into a wiry white girl with purple hair and throws the both of them to the floor, wining when her injured hand catches at the ground and sends stabs of pain shooting up her arm. Then she’s babbling—sobbing, stuttering, shouting all at once to be heard over the throbbing bass and the high of too much exercise and too little water.

The people around her comes to a slow, puzzled halt, and stare at the unhinged girl raving about someone committing murder and skeletal hands sprouting out of people’s flesh. Clary tries to catch their eyes—tries to make them understand, to make them believe—but all she gets is Yuqi and Aminata’s worried faces as they come to guide her to the exit where, they say, an ambulance is coming.

 

“Come on, Clary,” aminata insists when Clary refuses to cooperate, “you’re making a scene—everyone’s staring!”

“There’s nothing in there,” Yuqi adds, eyebrows knitted together, “you must have forgotten your meds or—”

“I’m not having a migraine!” Clary insists, desperation closing up her throat as she pulls her uninjured arm out of Yuqi’s grasp, “and I know what I saw alright—this girl, she almost got raped and she’s trying to fight this—thing off on her own but it’s got accomplices and it’s just—someone has to help her or she’ll get—I don’t know—eaten or something!”

“No one’s going to get eaten!” Yuqi yells in Clary’s face, “this is real life, not a fantasy book, Clary! Now shut up and come to the ambulance of I’ll find a way to drag you there myself!”

“But—”

“Clary, the bouncers are on their way here,” Aminata hisses, pointing toward the entrance, “see? If anyone needs help, they’ll do something, but you need to come with us just in case you really are seeing things.”

 

Clary wants to protest—opens her mouth to do just that, and then realizes she has no idea what to say. Maybe she is seeing things. It wouldn’t be the first time after all. Last time she had a significant migraine, she ended up panicking about seeing fairies in the garden and thanking the universe only her mother was there to see her go bonkers.

Slumping with defeat, she follows her friends out of the club. Around them, the other patrons part like the Red Sea, faces twisted in disbelief, curiosity or, worst of all, fearful pity. Clary slouches harder when she sees them, keeping her eyes glued to the ground until Yuqi and Aminata guide her into the cool night air and toward the bouncing lights of the ambulance.

 

The woman who greets Clary looks old—pushing sisty, maybe—but despite the gray hair and deep lines etched in the dark brown skin of her face, there’s no trace of hesitation in her movements when she steps up to Clary with a reassuring smile.

 

“Hello,” she says in a surprisingly deep voice, “my name is Arunya. What seems to be the problem?”

“She’s hallucinating,” Aminata says before Clary can respond.

“I’m not!” Clary retorts, glaring at Ami over her shoulder, “I’m not! I know what I saw!”

“You said there was a monster like a dead body coming out of a guy,” Yuqi points out, more gently, “I’m pretty sure it counts as hallucinating.”

“Not if it’s real!”

“Clary—”

“Alright ladies,” Arunya says in a placating tone, raising her hands, “let’s all calm down. How old are you, Clary? Can I call you Clary?”

“Yes. I’m nineteen.”

“Okay. Do you have any other problem beside the visions?”

“I’m not having visions,” Clary insists, clicking her tongue in annoyance, “I have some, sometimes, but right now it’s not like that!”

 

It could be though—she doesn’t like the idea, but it’s impossible to silence it entirely. The whole story sounds weird enough to be just that, at any rate—she dismisses the thought with a frown, though. This is different, she’s pretty sure. She remembers it, for one! She never remembers the stuff she makes up during her migraines—it’s her parents who have to tell her what happened afterwards.

If she remembers it this time, then it has to be different somehow, right?

 

“Fine,” Arunya replies, barely even phased,--it doesn’t even really sound like she’s just indulging Clary—“do you have any medical problem at all, then?”

“My wrist,” Clary says even as she remembers it, “the guy in the closet. He twisted it.

“What?”

 

Clary’s eyes snap to Yuqi and Aminata, who both stepped closer with shock written all over their features. It’s not a very nice reaction, she knows, but Clary glares at them anyway, pulling the sleeve of her blouse as far up as it will go, and revealing the angry, finger-shaped black marks on her skin.

 

“I told you there was someone,” she hisses, swallowing around the knot threatening to close her throat up, “or do you think I imagined that too?”

“No one thinks you imagined anything,” Arunya says, giving Clary’s left hand a light tug to recapture her attention, “may I take a look at your wrist?”

 

Clary nods and holds out her injured hand for inspection, doing her best to tune out Yuqi and Aminata’s worried conversation about calling the police, trying to figure out what they can do to help—they’re right, Clary knows. Right now, though, she mostly just wants to get her medical ordeal over and done with.

 

“I’ll go talk tot he bouncers,” Aminata says after a while, just as Arunya finishes splinting Clary’s wrist.

“this should do for a while, but I’d like to take you to the hospital so we can take an X-Ray and make sure your wrist isn’t broken. Is that alright with you?”

“Can’t I just keep this on for a few week?” Clary asks, careful to angle herself away from Yuqi, “I don’t have the money for an X-Ray.”

 

Something not unlike sadness passes over Arunya’s face, and she sighs as if in defeat before starting to put her material back into its case.

 

“Medically speaking, an X-Ray would be safer,” she explains in a soft voice while Yuqi, next to her, pretends not to hear, “but yes, the splint is better than nothing. Just be sure to check with your family doctor as soon as possible, and ask him about the best procedure from there.”

“I’ll do it,” Clary says with a nod, and Arunya smiles.

“Do you want us to call someone? Your boyfriend or your parents, maybe?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Clary replies, more disdainful than she thought she would be, “can’t I just sign the papers myself?”

“Yes, of course. I was just thinking you might find it comforting to have someone you trust with you after all of this.”

 

Clary shakes her head. She’s not the one who got assaulted tonight—if anything, the people in charge should be worrying about the other girl more than they are about her—and she doesn’t want to disturb her parents tonight. They haven’t gone out on a proper date in ages after all, and Clary is supposed to be an adult now, or near enough. She’s not about to ruin their evening.

She let Arunya pull out the paperwork, and gives her a grateful smile when she offers to write things down now that Clary’s dominant hand is temporarily out of commission. It takes a little effort to remember her social security number and the multitude of other detail no one really bothers to think about until they have to sign an official form, and Clary gets so absorbed in it she jumps a little when Yuqi says:

 

“I didn’t know your name was Clarissa.”

“I discovered that when I was eight,” Clary sighs, rubbing at her temple with her free hand.

 

Now she really might get a migraine.

 

“Really?”

“Everyone’s only ever called me Clary,” she shrugs, “I’m pretty sure that’s what was written on my schools’ admission forms.”

 

For a moment, it looks like Yuqi is about to ask another question, but just as Clary finishes signing the refusal form so she won’t have to go to the hospital, Aminata jogs back to them, heels clicking on the pavement.

 

“He got away!” she says when she reaches them, panting to catch her breath, “the bouncers said they found the guy—the one with the blue hair from earlier?—but when they tried to get him to the office so they could wait for the police, he gave them the slip. No sign of the girl.”

 

A cold gust of air crawls along Clary’s neck at that moment, and she folds in on herself, drawing her knees closer to her chest to preserve body heat and closing her eyes to try and block the sound of blood rushing in her ears. If the guy managed to see her face even through the deodorant spray....

 

“I want to go home,” she mutters against her knees, and sighs in relief when Yuqi’s hand comes to rest on her shoulder.

“I texted Ms. Knickerbocker a while ago. She’ll be here any minute now—we can tell her to drop you off first, if you want.”

 

Clary nods, curls up tighter against the sudden cold, and waits.

 

{ooo}

 

Clary gives her friends a thumb up when the front door to her apartment opens without problem, but she doesn’t wait until they’re gone to get in and lock the door behind her. Slowly, half-asleep already, she kicks her sneakers off and makes her way up the stairs. Once she’s there, though the prospect of crossing the entire flat to her room feels so far beyond her strength she almost collapses in the top hallway.

She makes her way over to the parlor instead, and settles down on the window seat, the smell of jasmine flowers drifting into the room through the gaps in the window frame. Then she take a deep breath in and, before she can do anything about it, she starts crying.

 

{ooo}

 

Clary wakes up to a bright, grinning sun staring at her in blue lines from a sheet of lined paper, and the ever-stressful impression that her arm is about to fall off for lack of blood circulation. She squints past the paper and the Squirtle alarm clock it’s propped against, and stares at the brighter line on the turquoise walls for several seconds before she realizes it’s just the sun filtering in. It looks bright enough to be late morning, and Clary is only marginally surprised when she checks her clock and it reads almost half past eleven.

With a yawn, she rubs at her eyes until the edges of the world stop blurring with sleep, and turns the sheet of paper around.

 

‘ _I found you in the parlor when we came home,’_ Luke’s ro und calligraphy says on the other side, _‘_ _I figured you’d sleep_ _b_ _etter in bed. I have to be out of town tomorrow but I’ll come over for lunch on Sunday. Rest well until then. Xxx.’_

 

Clary smiles at the message and makes a mental note to text Luke to tell him she’s okay. Then she gets out of bed with slow, careful movements that don’t jostle her too much and stretches until her legs stop feeling quite so numb. She gathers her clothes on autopilot, crosses the back hallway into the bathroom, and does her best not to think about anything while she stands up under the hot water.

 

She comes out of her shower far more awake than she was fifteen minutes ago and ready to face the world, only to be engulfed in a ribs-crushing hug as soon as her mother catches sight of her. She returns the embrace, breathing her mother’s perfume in until the weird urge to cry passes ans she can take a step back without risking an embarrassing moment. Jo smiles at her, fond and worried all at once, and laughs when Clary responds by crossing her eyes.

 

“Just like your dad,” she sighs, and Clary grins:

“Well, people do say I look just like him.”

 

Jo rolls her eyes at that because, of course, most people who says that are white. Clary and Luke have different skin tone—Clary has a paler version of Jo’s umber skin, Luke has more of a sienna complexion and stronger red undertones—different noses, different mouths...and of course, there’s the green eyes Clary inherited from the Fray side of the family.

 

“People need to get glasses,” Jo replies. Her expression goes more serious then, and she adds: “and you need to tell me what happened last night.”

 

Clary follows her mother’s pointed gaze down to the splint still bracing her right wrist—it doesn’t hurt just now, but the padding itches against her skin, and she can’t help but try and hide her hand behind her back before she really processes the futility of the gesture. It’s not like she was ever going to hide this for long, let alone until she healed entirely.

 

“Clary,” her mother insists after the silence has stretched long enough, “what happened?”

 

Clary starts slow. The evening at Pandemonium, her annoyance at being left alone, her decision to go and talk to a stranger—this one makes the tip of her ears grow warm as she recounts it—how stiff she looked when the guy started dragging her away from the dance...and then everything sort of stumbles out all at once—his anger, the way Clary’s bones felt when he twisted at her arm, how the girl punched him away, how Yuqi and Aminata wouldn’t believe Clary.

 

“I had to show them the bruises,” Clary says dejectedly, picking at the edge of her splint, “they kept saying I had to be hallucinating.”

“In their defense,” Jo stars, but Clary doesn’t let her finish:

“It wouldn’t be the first time, yeah, I know. But I know what I saw—and the bouncers said people saw the guy come out of the room,” she remembers, a bit too late. “They couldn’t find the girl, though.”

“Hopefully, it means she got away.”

 

Clary nods and hugs her mother again, chin lifting up and down with Jo’s sigh.

 

“I’m glad you got out of it lightly,” Jo admits, pressing Clary closer against her. “I don’t want to scold you because what you did was very brave but, Clary, I really do wish you hadn’t done it. Do you realize how badly things could have turned out?”

“Yeah,” Clary says with a small voice, “I watch the news.”

 

She stays like that—hidden in her mother’s arms in the middle of the hallway—for a long, long time, but it still feels like she lets go a little too soon.


	2. Demon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is a demon, and then there is a fall.

“Going out already?”

 

Clary stops on her way to the front hall, and answers her mother’s worried look with a reassuring smile.

 

“I’m up for it,” she promises with a gesture at her face and general demeanor, “see? All rested. Besides, you know Aminata’s going to kill me if I miss her first reading.”

 

Clary has been following her friend to Java Jones’ poetry readings for almost as long as she’s known her, mostly because words are as essential to Aminata’s well-being as pictures are to her own. That spot at the microphone is too much of an accomplishment to let it pass now, especially when the entire country is about to wedge itself between them.

 

“You only woke up two hours ago,” Jo points out, “are you sure you don’t want to stay here and rest some more?”

 

Dismissal is Clary’s first reflex—she has, after all, slept more than long enough to feel completely refreshed—but the frown on her mother’s face, when she actually pays attention, is far too deep to be only about that. Clary’s eyebrows rise with understanding, and she makes herself smile again:

 

“It’s the middle of the day, mom, and it’s not like Pandemonium is right next door. I’ll be fine. ‘Sides, if I stay here I’ll just be in your way—you’ve been on the phone ever since I woke up.”

“With Cat and Luke,” Jo admits with an odd little smile, “I took a day off. More importantly, Luke and I were talking about what happened to you. We think it’d be a good idea to set up an appointment with Dr. Neba.”

“Today?” Clary protests—almost whines, really—before she can think better of it, “But I—”

“No, he’s out of town until Monday,” Jo says in a tone of voice that leaves very little doubt as to her feelings on the matter, “and we wouldn’t book it behind your back, anyway. I just wanted to know if that was alright with you?”

“Oh! Sure,” Clary says with a breath of relief, “no problem. The EMTs said I should get my wrist checked anyway.”

“Thank you. You should also talk to Luke soon. He’s—worried.”

 

Clary frowns a bit at her mother’s pause, but Jo smiles and, well. It’s hardly the first time she stumbles over English after using Canti with Luke for a while.

(Clary tried to research the language on the web once, but it has to be the most obscure dialect in the world because she never could find anything about it, even after several hours and getting two different librarians involved. Sometimes it almost feels like Luke and Jo made it up between them.)

 

“Okay,” Clary agrees, mouth stretching over a surprise yawn, “I’ll call him as soon as the poetry meeting is over. Can I go now? I’m already late.”

“Fine, abandon me, you ungrateful child!” Jo mock-whines with a dramatic hand to her chest.

 

Clary rolls her eyes with a chuckle, checks her purse—keys, water, aspirin and her sketchbook, useless though it’ll be today—and hurries down the steps and through the front door, so focused on getting to Java’s before Ami’s poem she doesn’t even pause for her customary eye roll when her mother yells ‘I love you’ at her from the parlor window.

 

{ooo}

 

Running, as it turns out, makes Clary’s wrist throb with pain. It’s not a pleasant sensation, and she ends up walking to Java Jones, the only upside of that being that she gets there mostly sweat free, and she can slip into the cool micro-climate of the coffee-shop with a contented sigh rather than a shiver.

Aminata may be the one who dragged her to the poetry readings, but Clary practically grew up in Java Jones. This is where her mother would take her for treats on the weekend: they’d hole-up in the age-worn couch next to the toilets’ door and Clary would spend entire afternoons alternating between playing with her toys and watching her mother sketch out customers, sometimes adding antlers and wings and scale just to make Clary laugh. Clary’s first subjects, when she started learning to draw, were found here, whether they were customers, the chalk frescoes her mother created for the giant blackboard, or the soft lines of flower-shaped lamps.

Java Jones has a decidedly Art Nouveau feel about it. Curving greens and flowering yellows fill the space above earth-colored wood panel and hardwood floor, and even with minimal furniture it’s impossible not to pretend the place is some sort of liminal space, the entryway to a magical fairy realm.

The difference being, of course, that no one has ever been trapped into the shop after eating their food, but aside from that Clary is pretty confident in the comparison.

 

She gives Aminata a quick wave when she spots her—nervously biting her nails on the same couch Clary learned to draw on—and walks up to her favorite barista as he serves a couple of coffees. He got a new tattoo—some kind of brown, fur-like thing dripping blood on his biceps from where it pokes out of his shirt sleeve. Clary wrinkles her nose at it when he’s not looking, but she refrains from commenting and just waits for her drink in silence.

 

At last, she makes her way over to Aminata with a white chocolate frappé freezing her fingers and a reassuring smile on her lips, unsurprised when her friend’s first move is to grab for her elbow and almost spill her drink in the process.

 

“I thought you wouldn’t make it,” Aminata hisses, the tremor of nerves in her voice almost palpable, “where on earth were you?”

“Had a talk with my mom,” Clary replies as she extracts her arm from Ami’s hands, “she wants me to see our doctor about this.”

 

Aminata’s face turns contrite when Clary waves her splint in her field of vision, but Clary doesn’t let her fall into guilt and shrugs instead. She’s still nervous, it’s true. Despite her reassuring words to her mother earlier, she couldn’t helps but look over her shoulder on her way here, as if the guy with the blue hair were about to pop out of a side-street and start beating her any moment—but this is Java Jones. She’s known the shop and its regulars all her life, there’s no reason to think anything should happen to her here.

 

“So,” Clary starts, putting extra cheer in her voice to drive out the awkward silence, “did I miss anything interesting?”

“I think Eric Levinsky’s poem was about you again. You know, ‘fire hair’, ‘concentrated temper’, the usual.”

“Still confusing bad temper and not being a doormat, I see,” Clary mutters, and Aminata snorts.

 

The guy also fails to grasp the concept of lesbianism, but then he’s hardly the first, won’t be the last, and Aminata isn’t quite as invested in that topic anyway. It’d take too much fun out of the snipping if Clary ended up being the only one with a gripe, here.

Besides, there are plenty of other things to enjoy here. The shop smells like ground coffee and honeysuckle, swaddled in the tang of hot asphalt pervading the afternoon air and slipping inside by some kind of almost-miracle. From the outside, light and shadow play over the crowd, spotting them in warm golds and cooler greens as they mill about the shop with varying degrees of attention for the poets on stage. Even the coming and going of customers toward the toilets isn’t too bothersome tonight. It’s drags at Ami’s nerves, that’s obvious enough, but it’s mostly kept quiet, and the couch is still the best spot for people watching.

 

Clary sits with her friend in silence and lets the poetry wash over her while Ami’s fingers grip and then slowly relax around her forearm, the lull of words and crowd noises dragging Clary down into the couch and out of her shoes in record time. She’s almost asleep by the time Aminata jostles her elbow on her way to the stage, the host encouraging the crowd to applaud and make some noise for a shy but promising newcomer.

The speech is nice—though the praise would be more meaningful if Clary hadn’t heard it about every beginner poet performing at the readings—and it gives Clary just enough time to readjust her ponytail and straighten up to full attention before Aminata starts reading.

 

Then a hand lands on her shoulder.

 

She freezes, back painfully rigid and heart picking up the rhythm as if gearing up for a race, and she has to swallow a whine when she realizes Aminata is too focused on the crowd of listeners to realize what’s going on in the corner. Slowly, without moving her head, Clary glances down at the hand—wide, firm, wrapped in dark, petrole blue leather—and blinks tears out of her eyes. There’s a barista close to her, serving a couple at the next table over, and Clary somehow manages to catch her eye.

The girl—Sarah, her name tag reads—gives Clary a funny look but walks over anyway. The hand on Clary’s shoulder tightens and tugs, and Sarah frowns.

 

“Everything alright miss?”

“Can you tell this person to leave me alone, please?”

 

To Clary’s horror, Sarah’s features go from concerned to a confused frown, the shadows on her face turning the white of her skin almost gray when she asks:

 

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t bother,” a light voice says, a little above Clary’s head, “she can’t—”

“That boy,” Clary insists, jerking a thumb over her shoulder, “please tell him to let me go.”

“See me,” the boy finishes while Sarah schools her features into polite disbelief.

“I’m sorry, miss, but I don’t see anyone there.”

  
  


Clary wants to tell Sarah her joke is just about everything but funny, but somehow it doesn’t feel like that would make anything better. She breathes in deep instead, and winces in pain when the knot in her throat stings on the way down. _Don’t panic,_ she reminds herself, _think_.

Maybe she’s just hallucinating. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all, and she’s probably stressed enough for a migraine to come through. She felt fine a second ago but it’s still possible. Besides, she’s never remembered her hallucinations before—they could involve leather clad men for all she knows. She’s probably just being needlessly paranoid and looking like an idiot for no valid reason but…still.

The hand on her shoulder feels real—heavy and strong in a way she doesn’t think she could fight off. There’s nothing here she can use to protect herself, except maybe her ring, but even with that, she’d have to land a punch. she’s not trained enough to take that risk.

  
  


In her throat, her heartbeat speeds up and presses against her windpipe until the edges of her vision grow dark and she all but topples forward with a whine.

  
  


Sarah yelps.

  
  


“Careful!”

“Woah, Fray!”

“How do you know my name?”

  
  


Clary does her best to look angry more than scared as she twists around to stare at the stranger. He’s wearing a face mask, and the hood poking from under a black leather jacket obscures the rest of his face, making it impossible to distinguish in the low light of Java Jones. Clary takes a step aside, toward the exit, and hears someone hissing for her to shut up and sit down.

There’s a ripple of murmurs and whispers behind her, and an odd silence where Aminata’s voice should be, but Clary is too busy trying to go through her parents’ teachings to care.

  
  


Back to the exit? Check. Hands into fists, thumb over the finger? Check. Stalling for time until help gets there? On it.

  
  


“How do you know my name,” she repeats, raising her voice as she backs another step toward the exit.

“Does it really matter?” The guy asks, “Calm down, people are starting to think you’re nuts.”

“I don’t care!” Clary repeats, more forcefully, “I’ve never seen you before in my life—”

“Wha—oh, yeah, didn’t see my face, but I—”

“How the hell do you know my name?”

  
  


There’s an aborted sound, like the stranger was about to get frustrated and then decided it wasn’t worth it—then he jumps over the couch, hands reaching for Clary’s left wrist.

She manages to shove her splint into the face mask through sheer dumb luck, and dodges under his arm while he’s distracted. She barrels through the toilets door before anyone thinks of stopping her, both the guy’s and Sarah’s voice hollering after her.

  
  


She shoulders her way past a couple—one of them swear as they hit the ground—and doesn’t realize her mistake until she’s slammed the ladies’ restroom door shut behind her. Crap. Trapped in. Crap, crap, crap.

Clary drags her eyes around the room, breathing loud in her ears as she takes in the closed cubicles, only just waiting to burst open and reveal people yelling ‘surprise’ at her in an instant—but her shoulder still burns with the heat of a foreign hand, her wrist throbs with pain from hitting that guy, and all of it feels so real—and how would she know the difference? How do you even tell hallucinations from reality when they’re about things that could conceivably happen?

  
  


She’s got to call Jo. Preferably before she can throw up with fear.

  
  


She’s reaching for her back pocket when the door shakes behind her back, the handle digging into her back with bruising force. She yelps in fright, heart in her throat, and bites her lips hard enough to hurt when the guy growls:

  
  


“Come on, you can’t hide in there forever, you know that right?”

  
  


Clary clamps her good hand against her mouth and screws her eyes shut. Her throat, her eyes, her lungs are burning—her heart’s trying to choke her and her brain keeps supplying every horror story she’s ever heard about black girls in her position. The entire world seems to swim around her, and when the door rattles again—harder this time, like something heavy was thrown against it—Clary stumbles to her knees faster than she even whimpers.

Think, Clary. Think.

  
  


Forcing her eyes open, Clary blinks tears out of her eyes and tries to have a coherent look at the room. There’s no other door here, no safe exit—that’s why Lucy Teruko got stuck here for almost fifteen minutes on that horrible date of her until—the window!

Clary crawls to her feet—has to catch herself with her good hand before she falls flat on her face on the tiles—and throws herself into the last cubicle to the sound of a door banging open against the wall.

  
  


The window above the seat it barely large enough for someone to go through, and for once Clary thanks genetics for her pocket size, before climbing on the toilet seat. The porcelain is wet, and she ends up with one foot in the water and a painful ankle before she can regain her footing, but she does get the window open and her upper body through it as the first cubicle bangs open.

  
  


One after the other, doors slam against the walls of empty stalls. Clary forces herself to stay quiet and calls on long-unused monkey cage skills to hang on the windowsill with her hips, push her lower body forward, and land on her feet with a painful jolt to her ankle. Loud cursing follows her toward the main street.

  
  


Summer-hot asphalt burns at her feet as she runs, and people turn to stare as she races down the sidewalk, jumps over a golden retriever like she’s in the middle of a track meeting, and manages to cross in all the wrong places, terror pushing her to speed she’d only ever dreamed of before. Her entire body burns by now—feels like she’s going to collapse and start retching if she even thinks of slowing down—but she keeps going anyway.

  
  


  
  


She does have to stop, eventually, bending over a bunch of tired-looking hydrangeas about three quarters of the way to her place and emptying her guts over the stems, careful not to put too much weight on her left foot. She braces herself against a concrete wall while the nausea dies down, and makes herself take deep breaths while her brain slowly collects itself and analyses the situation.

  
  


She’s barefoot, blisters growing so fast she can almost feel them form. Her left ankle is busted. Her purse—with her money, her phone, her ID—is still at Java Jones, hopefully with Aminata, but it’s not like Clary is about to go back there to confirm.

In short, Clary probably looks like a maniac who doesn’t have the brains to put shoes on, with no way to call anyone in or prove who she is or the truth of what she say. Assuming, of course, that the whole thing isn’t just happening in her head.

She’s so screwed.

  
  


If she looked better—if she couldn’t feel rivers of sweat rolling down her back, feel the frazzled state of her ponytail against her back—she’d ask for help. Maybe. She’s heard horrific stories about black people asking for help and getting trouble instead though. Not all of them get out of it alive…and let’s face it, she doesn’t look good.

She just ran three blocks like somebody was out to kill her—which may or may not be the case—without shoes, and she doesn’t need a mirror to tell it shows. Frankly, she’s rather not risk it. Her ankle hurts, yeah, but it’s not broken, and it’s not like there’s much to do about blisters beside taking things easy and resting. Besides, even if the guy is real, Clary probably lost him by now, thank God for Jo and Luke’s insistence on track training.

  
  


Slowly, with a careful limp, Clary starts back toward her home, determined to get there, get back in bed, and not move for the rest of the weekend.

  
  


  
  


It’s hardly surprising that it takes her much longer than usual to get home, but that doesn’t mean she enjoys it. It takes effort to ignore the staring passersby, and some more to keep herself from wincing at the heat under her feet. The sun is getting a little less unbearable at this time of the day, but asphalt is stone. It keeps heat.

It sucks.

  
  


The good news is, although no one offers to help Clary, no one becomes a problem either, so by the time she reaches the little square in front of her home, she’s just about ready to weep with relief. The white little twins from two houses down are playing in the fountain, like they always do. The pug from across the square fell asleep in the shade again.

Clary steps up to her own building with the odd sensation of leaving what little was left of her energy behind, the wisterias from the facade wrapping her in its perfumed embrace long before she reaches her front porch, glad all of this happened on one of her mom’s home days.

She limps through the reception room without even a glance for the door that leads into Dorothea’s apartment and climbs up the stairs with her mother’s name half on her lips already.

  
  


She stops dead in her track when she notices the smear of blood at the top.

  
  


Her mouth stings when her hand slaps against it, but Clary doesn’t care. She swallows a frightened whine and keeps going, stomach heavy when a couple more steps reveal a long, bloodied shard of glass next to the gutted frame of one of Jo’s watercolors, and then Clary is actually high enough on the stair to take a good look around.

To the left, the parlor and the door to the art room both look undisturbed. To the right, on the other hand, the busted glass is far from the only damage. The sad remains of the living room door half-hang from the hinges, the bottom half lying on the floor like a mangled corpse, and stepping up to the landing to peer inside the room does nothing to reassure.

  
  


It’s like a hurricane went through it: the dinner table is on the ground, half a leg broken and abandoned next to the hallway door, a broken plate scattered all over the room. When Clary limps around debris and reaches the other side of the table, she finds large gouges in the wood and a bloody tooth on the floorboard. There are bloody hand prints on the threshold to the back hallway, and the largest kitchen knife lies on the ground with blood all over the blade.

No trace of Jo anywhere.

  
  


The twins’ laughter filters in through the open window, and Clary wonders how a house can possibly get turned into such a mess without the rest of the world being any wiser about it. Don’t they know something horrible just happened? How does the world even keep working around this? Clary’s legs sure don’t, at least, and she has to sit in the hallway before she ends up in a heap on the ground.

  
  


_Stop panicking,_ Clary tells herself—she’s heard those words so many times in Jo’s mouth, in Luke’s voice. If you’re in danger, don’t panic. _Think. Get helps, first. Panic later._

  
  


Get help first. Think first. Clary isn’t in a state to brave the phone yet—not if she wants to sound even vaguely coherent for the call. So, she thinks.

Clearly, someone broke into the house without being seen—maybe they used the back door. Just as clearly, someone got hurt. Probably Jo. Most likely Jo—oh, god, please let her be alive, let her—stop. Stop. Think. 911 has to come first.

There’s no way Clary can deal with all of this on her own, and there’s no guarantee Luke is even back in the city yet.

Police it is.

  
  


Clary stumbles to the kitchen on shaky legs, and stumbles over the undisturbed Fire Box on her way there. Her mother’s laptop is here, too, and Clary saw the silver candle holder on the ground when she crossed the living room, so either the people who came here weren’t after money, or they did a really poor job of it.

The aloe vera was thrown to the ground, along with most of the cutlery drawers, possibly in search of the kitchen knife. Clary has to look away from the fridge and its open door—like Jo forgot it, or maybe was stopped in the middle of something—and focus her sight on the land line to calm the tremors in her hands.

  
  


She keys the number in with bile rising up her throat. Forces herself to practice what she’s going to say. Breathes in deep to steady her voice. Screws her eyes shut when the movement of Jo’s screen-saver catches her attention.

She wants to go to bed—pretend none of it is happening and that Jo’s going to come in through the door any time, now, and take things in hands like she always does.

  
  


The hopeless fantasy shatters when Clary raises the phone to her ear, and nothing happens.

  
  


No sound.

  
  


No voice announcing the line is currently busy.

  
  


No dull beeping.

  
  


Nothing.

  
  


Clary sobs. Wipes tears out of her eyes. Does it again, and gives up when her lungs turn her breathing into full blown sobs. They cut the phone lines. The Wi-Fi router is intact, Clary’s seen it, but still. They cut the phone lines. Why would anyone cut the phone if they didn’t expect to find someone in? And why would anyone organize a robbery when there’s someone to witness them? Picking empty houses is just less work, isn’t it?

So, whoever came must have known Jo was here.

  
  


Maybe they even came specifically for her.

  
  


What if they’re here because of Clary, though? What if the rapist she saw in Pandemonium was some kind of—of gang member or mob boss or something? And he didn’t like Clary’s intervention and decided to take it out on her and managed to discover where she lived?

What if he sent the guy at Java Jones too, what if Clary was meant to be with her mom right now and the only reason she isn’t is because she went out and got stupidly lucky? What if all of this was only meant for Clary and Jo took the fall because she wasn’t there?

  
  


She shouldn’t have gone out. Should have listened to her mom and stayed in—she could have negotiated then. Begged for whoever came to spare Jo. After all, if this is all because of Pandemonium, she’s the only responsible one. She’s the only one who should pay for it, right?

She wasn’t there, though, and now Jo is gone God knows where in God knows what state and going through God knows what all because Clary couldn’t use her brain and stay out of somebody’s business and now she’s stuck wondering what’s happening and Luke won’t be here for hours yet and there’s no phone and no police and Clary’s panicking, she nows it, she knows, but knowing it doesn’t help and she ends up sitting in the dirt in the middle of the kitchen while sobs tear out of her louder than she even thought possible.

  
  


It takes her a long time to calm down—for her body to exhaust the tears and her breathing to slow down—but eventually, she does. She’s not even sure how. It’s not like anything’s changed. It’s just—it kind of feels like the attack putters out on its own, like a car running out of fuel.

It leaves Clary aching, her body back to throbbing in pain in ways she wouldn’t even have thought of as possible.

It also, thankfully, leaves her a little more coherent, like her mind got aired out.

  
  


It’s not much—it’s not a solution in itself, at any rate—but it does leave Clary coherent enough to remember Dorothea and her hermit ways. The woman so seldom leaves her apartment Clary used to be convinced she was a witch, so chances are she’s in…which means Clary can use her phone! All she has to do is get downstairs and ask politely—maybe negotiate a little but that’s negligible. Then she’ll call the police and Luke, and let him take over.

He’ll be far better than she is at this sort of thing, anyway. Clary has never seen either of her parents lose their head in a crisis, and wherever they learned this—it _might_ be an innate sense of calmness but Clary finds the theory a little hard to swallow—Clary is presently very, very glad for it.

So, get downstairs. Get Dorothea. Get Luke. It all sounds so simple, compared to the rest, that it makes Clary’s head swim and she trips over her own feet on the way to the back hallway. Not a problem in itself, except when it’s followed by a heavy scrapping sound.

  
  


Clary freezes. She’s alone in the apartment. At least, she’s pretty sure she is. Jo would have signaled her presence if she was there, wouldn’t she? Unless she was—no, Clary isn’t even going to think about that one. And anyway, scrapping isn’t creaking. Creaking could have meant the neighborhood stray cat getting in through Clary’s open window again.

Scrapping means someone dragged heavy stuff on the floorboard.

Logically speaking—assuming Clary’s logic is somewhat functional at the moment—it’s probably not someone out to get her. Probably. A kidnapper would be more discreet, right? They wouldn’t be stupid enough to make a mistake even an unprepared teen can spot.

Right?

  
  


It’s probably not Jo either. Clary wasn’t exactly trying to keep her noise levels down when she came in earlier, so if Jo were here, she’d have signaled her presence. Probably. And if she were too weak to call out, she’d be too weak to produce that kind of sound as well. Not Jo, then.

But in that case, who? An attacker? A kidnapper? Or worse, someone to finish the job and finish Clary off?

With her heart in her throat, Clary takes another, far more careful step toward the hallway, and steps around the creaking boards near the back staircase to reach for the kitchen knife and its bloody blade. Hopefully, having her fingerprints on it won’t get her in trouble later, but she’ll get to that problem if and when it poses itself. For now, not dying has to be a priority.

  
  


She tries to step around the glass again, but her legs are still numb from her panic attack, and clumsy with fright. She hisses when the sole of her left foot lands on a particularly nasty shard, and has to land on her heel with a heavy thud to avoid falling flat on her face—or worse, her knife.

In her bedroom, Clary hears something scrape again, and a sudden jolt on the circular handle makes her jump something like a foot in the air. Thankfully, she doesn’t freeze this time—slips past her bedroom to the closet door and flattens her back against it while she ignores the pain in her right wrist to try and open it without a sound.

  
  


Her door’s handle stops moving.

  
  


For a heartbeat, Clary thinks this might mean safety.

  
  


Then the door bursts outward and slams into her.

  
  


Clary barely has time to realize she’s in pain—sharp, stabbing pain in her left side where the handle hit, hot pulsing where sticky warmth floods down her nose—before she collapses to the floor, pure luck the only thing preventing her from impaling herself on her improvised weapon. When she manages to remind her eyes of which way is up—her head must have taken a bigger hit than she thought—Clary finds shoes first.

  
  


A battered pair of once-varnished shoes leads up to the sad remnants of faded black suit pants, and Clary has to struggle in order to keep following the line upward. She finds a shirt dirty enough that it barely retains the memory of white, the whole thing filled with really, really thick arms. Clary’s blood freezes in her veins long before she manages to find her aggressor’s…head.

There’s no face there—only a mess of purple-and-red scars like earthworms, features obliterated by thick, painful-looking tissues that barely part wide enough to reveal destroyed eyes. In he mouth—what was once a mouth—blackened shards mark the spots where teeth used to be.

  
  


A thick, bruise-purple hand reaches for Clary’s ponytail—flails for a second against its unexpected volume—and drags her off the ground by the hair, a scream flying out of Clary before she can fully process the gesture.

That seems to be the wrong reaction, thought, because the other hand appears in Clary’s field of vision, aiming for her throat in a way that makes Clary kick, squirm, scream as hard as she can until she remembers the knife in her hand and swings it around until it catches at the suit’s arm.

  
  


Clary falls to the ground with a thud and scrambles away from the—the—whoever or whatever the hell it is, half-crawling and half running toward the living room and front hallway until her right shoulder refuses to move and yanks her entire body back with it. She hits the other’s chest with a pained huff, tries to use the knife again, but this time all it gets her is enough of a slap in the face that the world starts spinning—and then a hand on her throat.

There’s a vague, stiffening feeling of déjà-vu when a gloved fist collides with the mangled vestiges of a cheek, but Clary doesn’t have time to process it before she’s dropped on the ground, next to a pair of thick leather boots.

  
  


“Get outta here!”

  
  


Clary’s feet get the message before she does, and she’s already jumped over the living room table by the time she recognizes the voice. Turning around reveals the same silhouette—wide shoulder, stocky built, clothing alternating between black and deep dark blues—except this time the hood is down, short cropped frizzy hair and a black-skinned face poking from behind the face mask as the guy tries to fight Clary’s attacker off.

  
  


He doesn’t seem to have much luck there. Clary smothers a panicked shout when the creature slams the boy to the ground—from there it’s like the world turns into a collection of details.

The kitchen knife in Clary’s good hand—shiny and bloody and bigger than it should be. A gasp, filling the room even through the louder grunts. Something like fear in amber eyes, surrounded by a familiar shade of brown. Clary’s hand raising.

  
  


Dull shock all through her arm.

  
  


The creature, clutching its knee, wailing like a wraith.

  
  


The boy—the man—coughing as he struggles to his feet. Turns to Clary. Panics—only for a moment, a short second, but Clary sees it—and shoves her away from him, into the front hallway.

  
  


“Get out of here! I’ll be right there!”

  
  


Clary spins on her heel so fast her twisted ankle doesn’t even have time to protest, shoots through the living room door, slips on the broken glass there, and rolls into the staircase.

  
  


It’s like the world skips a beat. One second Clary is running away from a fight to the death, the next she’s sprawled on her back in the reception room, unable to focus on anything but pain and holy hell there’s no air, no air, need air—

It occurs to her, after a while, that the fish-out-of-water sounds popping in her ears come from her. It doesn’t help. If anything, it makes things worse—drives home how bad her situation is and sends her into overdrive—makes her legs and back and stomach and head pulse harder under the flesh, burning with the heat of sudden pain even as she tries to turn around.

  
  


There’s a series of loud thuds upstairs. Hurried steps.

  
  


“Don’t move!”

  
  


Clary stops her effort, but even going limp hurts—there’s something warm on her upper thigh and a harsh, stabbing burn somewhere up her left arm, but she doesn’t dare looking around to assess the damage. Overhead, the stairs tremble with the weight of her savior’s steps, although he doesn’t make a sound, even when he jumps over the last few steps and lands into a crouch next to Clary, eyes roaming over her while his hands rummage into his jacket.

  
  


“Is it bad?” Clary asks, even though she knows the answer to that one already.

  
  


It’s still less scary to ask ‘is it bad’ than ‘am I going to die’ because she doesn’t want to—she doesn’t, really—but wet warm spot on her thigh is growing and the boy—man—whichever he is—sounds panicked where he throws foreign words into a phone. Clary’s head grows lighter, even a the rest of her seems to triple weight in an instant, black spots dancing in front of her and growing more numerous with every blink—of course it’s bad.

Really bad, if the way her would-be savior looks at her is any indication.

  
  


She’s already crying by the time he takes her hand, ready to tell her a bunch of reassuring things that may or may not be true—but when he finally grasps her injured hand, his features go from worried to shocked.

  
  


“Where did you get that?”

“What?”

  
  


Clary’s trying to follow his second answer, she really is—even through the darkening edges of her vision the urgency on his face is obvious, but there’s not enough blood left in her head for that to work. He must realize it as well—his face hardens,and he reaches for something on his side with something that may or may not be an apology.

  
  


He brings his hand to Clary’s thigh, and the world bursts into pain.

  
  


She thinks she screams. At some point, the man all but sits on her to stop her from moving away from him.

  
  


Pain, pain, pain.

  
  


Nothing.

  
  


Sharp, stinging pain on her cheek, and then words in her ears—urgent, and raw, and way louder than anything she’s ready to bear.

  
  


“Thank the Angels,” her savior says, “I thought I’d killed you!”

  
  


Clary tries to speak, but it doesn’t come out quite right—at the very least, she can’t make out more than a garbled sound, like her mouth fell asleep and refuses to wake up. Her general state of mind must be obvious enough, though, because a gloved hand comes to rest on her cheek, and golden eyes shift from relief to reassurance:

  
  


“It’s okay, Fray. You’re my sister. I’m gonna help you. I’ll take you back home.”

  
  


Clary is already home, mutilated though it is, and she tries to convey the message through the pained whine that escapes her. The guy shushes her, too dry to be soothing, and then he picks her up like she weighs nothing, bridal style.

  
  


In some distant corner of her mind, the more sarcastic part of Clary wonders when her life turned into an action movie.

  
  


“It’s okay,” the man says, “it’ll be a while before we get there but I glamoured us. You just go to sleep, I’ll take care of the rest.”

  
  


Well. At least Clary got herself a nice kidnapper.

  
  


Eventually, she does fall asleep.


End file.
